Eggcorn Forum

Announcement

Registrations were closed for a long time because of forum spam, but I have re-opened them on a trial basis.

The forum administrator (chris dot waigl at gmail dot com) reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.

"stable together" for staple together

Wedgwood and Atkinson (1872) assigned the origin of staple to the same Germanic roots that gave us “stab” and “steeple”. Initially, a staple was just a single skewer to hold things together, until the stapler was introduced in the 1950s. Stable, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word for “stand”. It’s a natural transition from “staple” together to “stable” together, in the sense of keeping objects organized forcefully, or stabilizing them. Granted, these may be inadvertent errors. There is no sense of stabling together, as if for livestock. After watching more closely my own typos, thinkos and assorted WTF errors over the past few months, I’ve come to see how amazingly loose is the connection between intention and action in the act of committing words to screen. Caveat eggtor.

Re: "stable together" for staple together

The voicing of stops before – le (q.v.) is noteworthy and relevant here. Given drip/dribble, sniff/snivel (& sniffle ), hop/hobble , and so forth, stab/stap > stable might seem, a priori, to be more likely than staple . However, there are pairs like grab/grapple as well, where the voicing seems to go backwards. Some bizarre stuff in there.
.
Yup, look out behind you, Egg-Tor.

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .